When starting out as a fundraiser, or CEO of a charity, it can be disheartening to discover a promising sounding trust or foundation that you know has supported causes in the same sector, only to read “We don’t accept unsolicited applications.” Learning that this is known as ‘proactive’ funding doesn’t temper the feeling you get when faced with what so clearly goes against good practice in charity communications: explaining a key piece of information about the yourself through a negative, and coming across as aloof and exclusionary.
You are left thinking: ‘Do they know about us and have already decided we’re of no interest to them? Or do they simply not know about us? How can we tell them about us, without going against their wishes or trying backdoor approaches, such as connecting with a trustee via network mapping, in a way that may well be tiresome and unwelcome to them?’
So, it’s a rare but great pleasure to read a positive framing of being a proactive funder such as that you find on the Helvellyn Foundation website, on a page called ‘How to be Discovered, which frames it far more positively.
The Foundation sets out the three ways that they might discover your organisation, through their desk-based research (such as search engines, scientific journals, social media and online articles), through networks (such as the Environmental Funders Network), and, best of all, a ‘Tell Us About You’ form, which invites you to submit information about your organisation.
Of course, they first remind you to review their ‘What We Fund’ page to ensure you meet their criteria, match one of their seven themes and adhere to their underlying principles, but they actually give you a way to be sure that you’re on their radar. After that, it’s up to you to make sure that you’re actively publishing things about your work to reminds them you’re there.
I’m not suggesting that the proactive funder model is inferior to the ‘responsive’ model. Peter Laugharn’s 2008 article Proactive vs responsive philanthropy lays out the different characteristics and rationale behind them, and warns against the extreme tendencies of each – the ‘directive’ and the ‘reactive’ models. It is worth reading in full.
However, I am suggesting that proactive grantmakers consider how they communicate their choice in a more positive way and be more open and transparent about exactly what they do to be proactive. I also suggest that they have the modesty to realise that their methods many not be perfect and, as the Helvellyn Foundation do, allow the amazing causes to tell you about themselves.
More reading
As much a note for me on what to read next as for readers!
Jonathan Ashton’s article on GoodGrantFundraising.org.uk covers three different ways of classifying trusts that gives us alternatives to the linear spectrum model of responsive/proactive.
He describes Diane Leat’s three categories, of ‘gift-givers’, ‘grant-makers’ and ‘investors in organisations’ (based on her 1992 study Trusts in Transition: The Policy and Practice of Grant-giving Trusts published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation), and Gemma Bull and Tom Steinberg’s quadrant (from their book Modern Grantmaking, 2021), with group decisions / individual decisions on the x-axis and highly intuitive / highly data-driven on the y-axis. And he also suggests a third way of categorising trusts, by their relative ‘distance from the cause’.
Do let me know if you know of others, and I will add them.
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